


Starjack Week 2019 Fills

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: M/M, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-02 01:00:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21152966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: My other Starjack Week prompt fills, excluding We'll Rise Up Ourselves, which merited its own posting by virtue of being 15,000 words long.1. Day 2 - Vacation/Downtime. Starscream and Wheeljack visit Earth. It isn’t completely terrible.2. Day 3 - Trust. Wheeljack is kidnapped by some Decepticons. Starscream appears. Wheeljack isn’t quite sure if this is bad news or good news.3. Day 4 - Hobbies. Wheeljack tries to get Starscream to have fun on a night off. To Starscream, Windblade and Earth party games sound like the makings of a terrible evening.4. Day 5 - Healing/Patience. Starscream visits Wheeljack’s apartment.5. Day 6 - Confession. A small coda to We'll Rise Up Ourselves.





	1. Day 2 - Vacation/Downtime

**Author's Note:**

> All of these minifics are also available on my tumblr! Posting here for archiving purposes.

“I hate earth.”

“I know.” Starscream had declared that he hated earth six times so far in their trip from Cybertron to Sanctuary and then to earth. Other things he’d complained about included the Milky Way, Soundwave, grass, sand, shuttles, and organic life in general. “We’re almost there.”

“I fail to see how that’s supposed to cheer me up.”

“He’s your damn trinemate,” was all Wheeljack had time to say before Thundercracker shouted at them from inside the building they were approaching.

Wheeljack kept pace with Starscream, who was dragging his feet now. Thundercracker opened the door of the compound he’d given them the coordinates to, apparently content to meet them in the middle.

Something small and organic was racing toward them, trailed by Thundercracker, whose walk matched pace with the tiny thing’s sprint.

“Don’t let it touch me,” Starscream shrieked, backpedaling as the thing ran determinedly toward him. Wheeljack reaches out a hand to steady him.

“Easy, Buster.” Thundercracker was smiling as he picked the thing up, holding it in the palm of his hand and stroking it with one gentle finger as he straightened.

“You promised I wouldn’t have to touch that thing,” Starscream said, looking uneasily at Buster.

“I know, I know, let’s get inside and” his voice changed completely “we’ll see if he warms up to you when you turn up the charm, yeah Buster, huh?”

“Who _are_ you?” Starscream asked, in a tone of voice that would have been cutting from anyone else. Wheeljack has learned to hear the fondness in his snarls.

They followed Thundercracker inside. He was living in a stark compound constructed from what were clearly human materials. There were chairs, a table, a berth, soft things that looked like dog supplies, and in one corner, a massive desk that bore an unfamiliar contraption. Wheeljack left Starscream to complain about the mud caked on his feet to Thundercracker in the entryway and went to examine it.

“It’s a typewriter!” Thundercracker’s booming voice made Wheeljack jump.

“A what?”

“Oh, _don’t_ –” Starscream started, but Thundercracker was already explaining how the little tabs pressed ink onto a sheet of compressed tree pulp, and about how _real _writers did it ‘the old-fashioned way.’

“You must have had this custom-made,” Wheeljack said. The machine was about as tall as the average human was.

“I did!”

“How is that old-fashioned, then?” Starscream was sitting on one of Thundercracker’s chairs, glaring daggers at Buster, who seemed to have gone to sleep in Thundercracker’s palm.

Wheeljack sat back and grinned as an argument that never seemed to shy away from being good-natured raged between the two Seekers. It was pretty obviously the first time the two of them had talked in a long time, with how they kept stumbling on lack of knowledge about each other’s lives, but otherwise it was warm. Wheeljack could see Starscream choking back remarks that would be too cutting, Thundercracker stumbling over the same.

Eventually Wheeljack excused himself, mumbled something about looking at the local flora. Thundercracker asked him to keep an eye on Buster and Wheeljack acquiesced. Wheeljack gave Starscream a look as he was leaving that he hoped conveyed _I’ll give you as much time as you need._

Wheeljack did indeed look at the flowers, and threw a stick Buster brought him like he’d seen the humans do in dog movies. Buster spent a while hunting for the stick and then brought him another, which he lobbed a shorter distance. This continued until Starscream came to get him, wincing affectedly at the organic matter caking his feet as he made his way across the field.

“Didja talk?” Wheeljack asked, obediently retrieving the tiny stick from Buster’s mouth and throwing it again for Buster to chase after.

“Not really. But it was nice.” Wheeljack had hoped that the two of them would talk about the fact that they hadn’t spoken in years, maybe even the reasons why, maybe even Megatron. But whatever it was the two of them were now, they had been Decepticons, and their relationship had never had a chance to grow past that. But maybe it could. Maybe it would.

“Ready to head back?” Wheeljack asked, scooping Buster up like he’d seen Thundercracker do earlier.

“Please,” Starscream said. He stopped Wheeljack outside Thundercracker’s hut, though, and poked a finger towards Buster in Wheeljack’s hand. Buster licked it, and Wheeljack was lucky enough to look up in time to see both Starscream’s smile and Thundercracker’s echoing it through a window behind him.


	2. Day 3 - Trust

Wheeljack came to on a cold floor with the distinct impression that the world was spinning. Or he was spinning? One of those, anyway, and there wasn’t really a difference. Both possibilities indicated something bad was going on with his processor.

A flash of purple above him. Wheeljack rebooted his optics slowly, hoping that he’d been imagining the shape of it. The dizziness didn’t recede as he realized that he was upright, sagging against the pillar he was attached to with heavy-duty chains.

No such luck. The damn war was “over” and yet Wheeljack appeared to have been knocked out and kidnapped by Decepticons.

“He’s awake!”

Wheeljack groaned and would have dragged his hands over his faceplate if they weren’t secured behind his back. Whatever happened next was sure to be unpleasant. This wouldn’t be the first time he was behind enemy lines, but there weren’t _supposed_ to be enemy lines anymore. “What do you want?” he asked. He heard the words slur a little. They must have knocked him pretty good.

“You’re the engineer, correct?”

Wheeljack sighed and onlined his optics, which seemed like the survival-oriented thing to do in this situation. He thought about lying, and in the end just shrugged his shoulders. He’d once had plans for what to do in situations like this. Right now he wasn’t even convinced he was awake.

“_Your_ kind cursed us with these I/D chips,” another Decepticon said. Neither of the two standing near Wheeljack were familiar to him, and he could see several more moving around in the large room they were in. somewhere underground, maybe? No – his vision was good enough to see the weld lines in the tiles making up the wall. At some point in the last few weeks, these Decepticons had constructed themselves a hideout.

“And what, you think I can get rid of them?” Wheeljack injected as much skepticism into his voice as he could manage. He could, was the thing. Easily. Telling the Decepticons that fact would _not _be the survival-oriented thing to do.

A makeshift door burst open at one end of the compound. Wheeljack turned toward the noise just in time to see Starscream waltz in.

Wheeljack felt his shoulders relax a fraction and then schooled himself. As much as he’d like it for Starscream’s presence to be good news, he had to be realistic. Starscream had been helpful, before. He had seemed genuine, had seemed trustworthy.

And Wheeljack wouldn’t have survived the war but for the cold, rational part of his processor that wondered if maybe it had all been leading to this.

Then Starscream met his optics, face impassive instead of gloating. He winked one of them in a flicker that could have been a trick of the light and Wheeljack no longer knew what to think. “This is a surprise,” he drawled. The two Decepticons standing over Wheeljack both looked at Starscream in what must have been remembered deference.

“We’re taking things into our own hands,” one of them said, making a fist and using it to punch his other palm for emphasis.

“Tell me more,” Starscream said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “I can’t wait to hear what you’ve accomplished.”

The two ringleaders looked at each other. “We got him,” one of them said, gesturing to Wheeljack.

Starscream rolled his eyes practically into orbit and started laying into the pair of them about how stupid their plan was. While there were no Decepticon optics on him, Wheeljack slipped a tool out of his hip compartment and felt around for the lock on the chains that bound him. He found it and slid the pick inside.

Then he stopped. There were at least ten mechs, seasoned soldiers, between him and either of the exits. If Wheeljack broke free of his chains, one of them would shoot him before he reached the outside world. If that happened, the Autobots would raze this place and everyone in it when they found out what had happened. The world wasn’t supposed to be like that anymore.

Wheeljack thought about Starscream’s wink.

He’d told Starscream that he trusted him.

He removed the pick from the lock without bothering to unlock it and slid it back into his compartment.

Moments later, Starscream’s face was practically pushed up against Wheeljack’s, with a sneer that hinted at none of the earlier camaraderie. “Can you disable the I/D chips?” he asked.

Wheeljack tried not to flinch when Starscream’s hand grasped his. Luckily, it only took a moment for him to realize that Starscream was trying to tell him something chirolinguistically. _Say yes._

“Yes,” Wheeljack said. He’d committed to trusting Starscream, and at this point it didn’t matter how intensely he regretted it.

Starscream let go of him and pulled back. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You come outside with me, and once you give me the information needed to disable the chips, you’re free to go. You try to escape without giving me the information, I shoot you dead. Sound fair?”

All Wheeljack could think to do was nod.

“Good.” Starscream used a wrist blaster to shoot the lock of Wheeljack’s chains, close enough for Wheeljack to feel the heat of it on his hands. He couldn’t help flinching at that, and one of his original captors chuckled.

Wheeljack let Starscream haul him up by one arm and walked at pace with him out of the compound, out into the sunlight. Starscream kept up his pace, marching Wheeljack across a span of empty field toward New Iacon. His grip on Wheeljack’s arm softened but his hand stayed where it was.

“Won’t they be asking you for the information?” Wheeljack asked, once they were halfway to New Iacon and he was _certain_ that Starscream wasn’t planning to turn on him.

“Sure. I’ll tell them you overpowered me and ran. Their mistake, trusting me. There are other groups of ‘cons who have already figured it out – clearly none of them think that the world will be improved by these grunts having access to alt modes and weapons.”

“Their mistake?”

“What?” Starscream deigned to look over at Wheeljack with a skepticism that would have seemed more genuine if Starscream had ever let go of Wheeljack’s arm.

“You said it’s their mistake to trust you.” Wheeljack couldn’t figure out how to connect that to what he really wanted to ask, so he went right out and said it. “Why’d you let me go?”

Starscream didn’t respond for several steps. They were almost at the edge of New Iacon. Wheeljack was half-convinced that he was going to pretend that Wheeljack hadn’t asked him anything when he said, abruptly, “Because you believed that I would.” He released Wheeljack’s arm and took a step back. “I saw you give up on that abysmal plan of yours.”

Wheeljack didn’t bother to hide his smile, letting it show in his optics. “Thank you,” he said. Starscream seemed to think that that was all he had to say, and turned to walk in another direction. “And hey,” Wheeljack said on impulse. He sent out a localized public ping with his comm frequency. “In case you ever wanted to meet up under better circumstances.”

Starscream, still half facing away from him, nodded. “Your friends won’t like this.”

“No, they won’t,” Wheeljack admitted. Then, mostly because it had seemed to mean so much, he said, “But I trust you.”

Starscream had enough of his face turned toward him for Wheeljack to see a ghost of a smile on it before he stalked off alone.


	3. Day 4 - Hobbies

“I’m not going to a bar.”

Wheeljack paused, opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. His goal here was to get Starscream to relax, not to drag him along on Wheeljack’s idea of fun. “What about a party here?” He didn’t allow Starscream to voice anything that was behind the scathing look he gave Wheeljack before continuing. “Something low-key, just a few other people. I have a new barrel of my scientifically perfected engex to show off.”

“I’m the leader of Cybertron. I can’t host a _low-key_ party.”

“I suppose not. That’s why I would be hosting it.”

That seemed to halt Starscream’s objections in their tracks. The next time he opened his mouth, his only objection was “No Windblade.”

“Yes Windblade.” _That’s half the point, getting you two to make nice._

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You don’t want to try my latest most perfect engex?” Wheeljack suffused his voice with as much hurt as he could manage.

“Fine.”

**

Starscream had been trying to level a practiced Decepticon glare at Wheeljack for the better part of ten minutes, but Wheeljack had managed to evade him. The bastard had not only invited Windblade, he’d allowed her to bring along _Chromia_, the whole reason for the blackmail that held together their uneasy truce.

“We could play Flipstacks,” Windblade suggested at one point, when they had run out of conversation topics due to the Camiens having nothing at all in common with the rest of them.

‘The rest of them.’ As if he had anything in common with the Autobots making up the rest of his current company. Ugh. Starscream should have made more friends during the war.

That train of thought was drivel enough to make him abandon it in favor of focusing on the grotesquely boring conversation taking place in Wheeljack’s apartment. They’d decided that they didn’t have the necessary equipment for whatever Windblade had suggested, which led Ironhide to yell “That sounds like an Earth game! Flipcup!”

Wheeljack had his helm in his hands at the very suggestion, and Starscream was immediately intrigued.

“What’s flipcup?” Chromia beat him to asking.

Ironhide leapt up to demonstrate instead of explaining, and Starscream patted Wheeljack’s shoulder in response to Wheeljack’s long-suffering sigh.

**

Flipcup, as he’d suspected from Wheeljack’s reaction, was awful. Starscream was starting to rather like engex pong, though, even though his suggestion that they just try to shoot the cups off the table had been vetoed by the rest of the group. He was pressed against Wheeljack’s side and Wheeljack had a casual arm looped around the base of Starscream’s wings, optics narrowed in focus as he scoped out his next target. Chromia was making a pathetic attempt to glare at them from across the table, and Windblade looked contemplative, which was significantly more threatening. If she was over there thinking about how she might be able to use Starscream’s…fondness for Wheeljack against him, then she had another –

“Stop it. Let me concentrate,” Wheeljack said.

“I wasn’t doing any –”

“You were tensing up. Bad for aim,” Wheeljack said. Apparently talking somehow wasn’t, because Wheeljack, tightening his arm around Starscream, sunk the ball into one of Windblade and Chromia’s cups. Starscream graced them with his most fiendish grin at the victory until Wheeljack elbowed him in the side. “You’re up.” 


	4. Day 5 - Healing/Patience

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter deals with a touch averse character intentionally pushing his own boundaries

Wheeljack tensed on instinct at a sudden noise at the other end of his empty flat. It only took a second for his processor to identify the source of the noise – his window, the one that looked out over a back alley, sliding open.

Even after all this time, the noise still managed to surprise him. It wasn’t like he was given the chance to expect it, ever – he suspected that Starscream varied the days and times that he dropped by on purpose. But the inconsistency was a small price to pay for the unfathomable gift of Starscream dropping by at all.

“You didn’t show up at work today,” Starscream said, instead of _hello_. He walked over to where Wheeljack was sitting on a bench and paused, hovering next to Wheeljack until Wheeljack patted the space next to him.

“Couldn’t,” Wheeljack said. “Headache was bad this morning. I couldn’t have walked down the street in a straight line, no one in their right mind woulda let me near the Aerialbots.”

“You’re feeling better now?” Starscream’s hand hovered near Wheeljack’s face and Wheeljack pressed his faceplate into it as he nodded. Eventually Starscream would figure out that Wheeljack wasn’t as weird as he was about personal space and touch, but for now Wheeljack had to show that he was comfortable with it every time.

“Little better. I’m hoping it’ll be gone by morning.” Ever since he’d woken up from having his helm shot off, Wheeljack had had occasional, unpredictable bouts of phantom pain in his head. Wheeljack knew that it was just his system recalibrating to the outside world and that there was nothing actually wrong, but that didn’t keep the pain from bowling him over, and using sensation blockers both lengthened the episodes and made his senses too foggy for him to work through it. He’d started simply resigning himself to the occasional miserable day.

“Does anything help?” Starscream asked. Wheeljack’s chin was still cupped in his palm.

Wheeljack would bet money that Starscream wasn’t ready for him to say _you_, true as it may have been. “Not really,” he said instead. “But vidscreens and datapads make it worse, so I’ve been bored all day. Talking would be nice.”

“Oh, good, because I was hoping to tell you about this asinine thing one of the Velocitronians said on vidcall today –”

Wheeljack listened to Starscream’s story, chuckling and commenting when Starscream gave him the space to. Starscream relaxed in slow stages next to him, going from perched on the tip of the bench to leaning against the wall next to Wheeljack over the course of minutes. Wheeljack tried to scooch closer as Starscream continued his cheerful tirade, but Starscream tensed up again like lightening at the smallest of movements, and Wheeljack stopped. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, you didn’t _do _anything wrong.” Starscream’s hands were balled into fists, and for a moment Wheeljack was convinced that he was about to flee. A few silent, still, too-long moments passed. Then Starscream forcefully unclenched his hands and reached for Wheeljack. He placed a tense arm across Wheeljack’s shoulders.

Wheeljack wanted to move in closer, wanted to rest his head on Starscream’s shoulder and fall into recharge listening to his seemingly neverending diatribe about his coworkers. But Starscream was so tense he hurt to look at, so Wheeljack settled for asking “Are you okay?”

“Of course.”

“Starscream.”

“It’s fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

At that, Starscream settled back against the wall, arm still looped around Wheeljack, his posture disaffected. “You were saying?”

“Starscream, I don’t –” Wheeljack wished that this could wait until his head was feeling better, but Starscream was pushing the issue and it wasn’t in Wheeljack to take the comfort when it so obviously came at the price of Starscream’s distress. “You don’t gotta do this for me.”

“You want me, to, though.”

“Not if it bothers you. I’m touchier than you, I get that. I _accept _that. I don’t want you forcing yourself to do something you’re not comfortable with if you think it’s the price of spending time here, or some slag like that.”

Finally, Starscream released his hands to fold them tightly together in front of him. “That’s not what I think.”

“Mm-hmm?” Wheeljack had long ago found out that giving Starscream space to talk, in the simplest way he could, worked much better than cajoling or demanding or even asking for information.

“I don’t enjoy prolonged contact,” Starscream said, voice tight and optics on his clenched hands. “And yes, I want to try to touch you despite that. Not for you. And not…not for you. I want to change how I feel about it. I want to be there for you, in that way, and I want to _want _it.” 

“Okay,” Wheeljack said. “What can I do to make it easier?”

Starscream thought about that for a while, as if he hadn’t expected that kind of question to be turned on him. “Being away from windows,” he said eventually. “No sudden movements.”

“Okay,” Wheeljack said. “Berthroom?”

Starscream looked over at Wheeljack with something like surprise, as if he’d expected something other than Wheeljack’s easy acceptance. Wheeljack waited until Starscream had stood up and offered him a hand to climb to his feet, clinging to Starscream when the motion amplified the pain in his head.

Starscream held onto his hand all the way to the berthroom, and when they reached the berth Wheeljack lay next to Starscream and laid his helm heavily on Starscream’s chest plating before he’d really remembered why they were here. “This okay?” he asked, ready to fall asleep like that.

“It’s a bit much.” There was an edge to Starscream’s voice that almost but didn’t quite disappear as he added, “I’ll try to get used to it.”

“Let me know if you need me to move,” Wheeljack said, seconds before falling asleep.

**

He awoke lying on something warm and alive. His head felt practically fuzzy from the lack of pain – a good recharge had apparently wiped out the last of it. He shifted his frame and felt the body beneath him tense then forcibly relax.

“Sleep well?” Starscream asked.

“Slept great,” Wheeljack said. He onlined his optics and angled his helm to look at Starscream. He felt a pang as he took in his appearance and realized that Starscream probably hadn’t slept at all, but there was a tiny smile on his face, and Wheeljack reminded himself that he trusted Starscream. In this case, he trusted Starscream to know his limits.

Wheeljack was careful not to move too fast as he moved off of Starscream and out of the berth. He was pouring energon at the dispenser when he heard Starscream come up behind him. Wheeljack turned his helm toward him and smiled as Starscream, carefully telegraphing his movements, draped his arms around Wheeljack from behind.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Confession. 
> 
> Takes place in the universe of We'll Rise Up Ourselves and contains spoilers for that fic! 
> 
> Starscream and Wheeljack...talk...about feelings...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is for MagicalSpaceDragon, whose comment inspired it :D

“Hey Starscream.”

“Hm?”

“What were you thinking, when I kissed you for the first time?”

“Glad it was finally happening. You’d obviously wanted to do it for a while.”

Wheeljack hoped his embarrassment didn’t show on his faceplate. “If you knew that, why didn’t you ever make a move?”

“Because if I’d made a move, you would have insisted on talking about _feelings_.” He said it like he was describing a particularly unpleasant disease.

That attitude was something that Wheeljack suspected the two of them would have to continue working on addressing for the next several millennia, so he ignored the comment about feelings and said “But you wanted to?”

“Of course I wanted to.”

“For how long?”

Starscream laid both hands over his spark and widened his optics in a comical likeness of confession. “Ever since I saw you across the battlefield, wearing that ugly red badge.”

Wheeljack rolled his optics. “No, seriously.”

“Why are you asking?” Starscream moved his hands to cross his chest.

“Just curious. We spent so long hiding it from each other, and now there’s no reason to.”

“We’ve already established that you were spectacularly bad at hiding it,” Starscream corrected.

Wheeljack nodded because, well, that was probably fair. “You’ve avoiding the question.”

Starscream huffed a sigh. “Do you remember our first Council meeting?”

“Yeah.” Wheeljack couldn’t remember anything remarkable about it, though. It had been dull aside from the low-grade panic that had permeated everything back at the beginning of the arrangement.

“You asked Tyrest ‘Will we have to kiss or anything?’”

“It was a valid question!”

“The concept of kissing you never left my processor,” Starscream said. “The indication that you’d been thinking about kissing me…well, I assumed that eventually you’d want to, and I had to plan ahead, was how I justified it.”

Wheeljack thought about all the times he’d caught Starscream looking at him, assessing. He’d figured, all that time, that it was Starscream learning to read his expressions, which Wheeljack knew took some work. He wondered now how much of it had just been Starscream imagining kissing him. He chuckled.

“What?” Starscream snapped, and Wheeljack reminded himself that what Starscream had just said probably counted as a sincere confession, to him.

“Just funny that it went on for that long,” Wheeljack said.

“What about you, then?” Starscream said it like it was a challenge.

“You know that I don’t really…get feelings like that,” Wheeljack said. “I kissed you, that day, because I wanted to show you how much I care about you. But if you’re asking when I knew I wanted to be married to you for real…” Wheeljack thought about Starscream on the other side of prison bars, telling Wheeljack that he’d trusted him. He thought about Starscream being trustworthy, over and over, and going up against his whole personality in a real attempt to be a better partner. Thinking about it all warmed him and left him with no answers. “I dunno. It didn’t happen all at once.”

Starscream leaned back on the couch and spread his arms, making space for Wheeljack to lean against him. “If it’s a long story,” he said, “I have time.”

Wheeljack laughed, then moved to lean his head against Starscream’s shoulder and started talking.


End file.
